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January 30, 2007

Ah, this movie, this movie. Do I applaud or do I shake my head disapprovingly? Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom (bolded for impact) is a supremely trashy Japanese exploitation flick from 1973. I think it's loads of fun, but as you will soon see, this depends on your definition of the word "fun". I was actually recommended the film by someone, and that, uh, must say something about me as a person.
This movie is about just what it says on the box: a terrifying girls' high school where lynching is, in some cases, the law. It is more often the case that torture is the law; this is what happens when your power-hungry vice principal forms a sadist squad to enforce discipline at your all-delinquent girls' school. Unfortunately for the hall monitors, the girl they torture in the first scene of the movie has a little too much pep in her. After they suck the blood out of her with a chemistry kit, she still puts up a fight, and the girls end up saying "oh, fuck it" and tossing her off the roof of the school. They receive a pay cut, and the events of the film are set into motion.

Our anti-heroines are three tough chicks who all get arrested at the same time and dragged to the School of Hope for some rehabilitation. While Razor-blade Remi and the Sappho of Osaka are both notables, pictured here is the only really important one. This is Noriko, the Boss with the Cross (bolded for impact) and she's out for revenge. This shot is from my favorite scene in the movie, a completely non sequitur motorcycle jump over a bunch of oil drums. That's just the kind of movie this is.

The girls go about exacting revenge by waging all-out war on the school. The film proceeds as follows. Pay attention because this is complicated:

Our heroines fuck somebody to further their cause (usually blackmail)

The disciplinary committee tortures somebody (often the heroines)

Our heroines and the disciplinary committee get into a fight

And repeat. In between, shady male authority figures pull strings. I almost don't want to tell you all of the crazy shit that happens in this movie because saying "what" is half the fun, but I'll tell you this: lightbulbs are put into places that lightbulbs should not be put, the school is bludgeoned to rubble with sticks, and a man lights a cigarette in the flaming wreckage of his own car. Nonstop depravity! A real class production, thanks to good old Toei.

January 28, 2007

So yeah, Idiotarod was a pretty good time. You are probably not initiated so here goes: The Idiotarod is a race modeled after the famous Iditarod dogsled race, with a few key replacements:

replace "dogs" with "humans"

replace "sled" with "supermarket shopping cart"

replace "Alaska" with "New York City"

It is quite the spectacle, and my friends and I have followed the carts since a few years ago (we weren't around last year though). If this whole business sounds illegal, that's because it is. But it was smaller, and it was overlooked, until they made a CSI episode about it. This year, the police greeted passers-by outside of Metropolitan Street Station, telling them the race was cancelled. Well, shit! I caught up with a friend, who caught up with a friend, who caught up a friend with a car.

The real starting point was elsewhere; someone had to tell you. One of our friends knew a team, so we were good. But the police found out too, and here's what the starting line looked like. The crowd was absolutely immense, but nobody really knew what the hell was going on at this point; we walked around, watched, waited, and took pictures. What else was to be done? The cops were right there, man.

Then it happened. Without any warning, firecrackers and air horns went off. This was apparently the signal to start. Hell, it didn't matter whether or not it was; it was noise, and it got people moving. Everybody got going, and with a ten-minute "hey wait you guys" handicap, the cops left right behind them. With no idea what was going on and no idea where to go next, we got back in the car.
At first it looked like they were gathering again up on the corner, making another starting line, but we were apparently too late to see that happen. Once again, the cops followed and again, people started to move. Again, we hadn't the slightest idea where we were going. We had to start asking the teams; they weren't really sure either. We decided to just follow the carts over the bridge.
Eventually, they led us to this park. You can see this in the Flickr photoset, but I basically camped out at the finish line waiting for teams to come in. My favorite team? Probably the Noids. Maybe North Korea? The finish line is an event unto itself; you have to navigate some obstacles and, in many cases, get pelted by race organizers, who wielded a variety of food products. I was myself covered in flour, hit in the head with a peanut, rained on with corn kernels, and of course, I noticed a little bit of mustard on my jacket when we left.
Like I said, there were a lot of teams and a lot of spectators; after a while, the crowd started looking like this. There was something of an impromptu afterparty going on; total chaos, as you can imagine. In front of us was the fisherman team; they just so happened to have a number of, well, fish. Fish were tossed, fish baseball was played, firecrackers were stuck inside of fish, and, well, a good time was had. Here is a destroyed toilet seat which formerly adorned a cart.
Of course, after a while, we weren't alone. It looked like the police were just settling for watching; as far as I could tell, nobody got in any trouble during the time we were there. Once we had had our fill of the shopping-cart revelers, we decided to go to the real afterparty to see Peelander Z. But then we decided not to, having other stuff to do that day. Sadly, our Idiotarod story ends here. It was a good one. See you guys next year.

January 25, 2007

These guys are geniuses. They've made a videogame that combines the angst and battle systems of the JRPG with the compelling backstory of Space Jam. There's only a demo thus far, but it's a really special half-hour, and you can get it over here. Master the Zaubers and beware ye the Japanophile save points!

January 24, 2007

I don't even typically go for Youtube drama; I use the site for the funnies and the obscure, and often the obscure funnies. I'm too busy laughing to see what makes people get all angry. But this time, the comedy and the dramedy have intersected, and I've got to say the results have been epic.

Last Friday, a video called "The Bible Says" showed up on Youtube. It's a Christian rock video sung by an overly sincere, pink-shirted and mustachioed fellow by the name of Donnie Davies. The song is very typical inspirational Christian radio stuff, until about forty seconds in, when Donnie starts to discuss the Biblical stance on homosexuality. Then he kicks it up a Phelpsian notch. Have a look:

How about that, huh? Now Donnie never gives up the joke, but the video is a pretty blatant parody of the real and terribly sad "gay
rehab" movement backed by many fundamentalist Christians. Lines like "to get into heaven, there's no backdOOOOR!" and "there lies no virtue-- in SOOO-DOOOO-MYYYYYYYYYYY!" should really tip people off. Hell, Donnie Davies is a name that only characters in comedy sketches have.

But, well... Youtube commenters long ago proved that they aren't much for the finer points. I'd say they were immune to subtlety, but these gags are about as subtle as the nail in a board with a nail in it. In any case, nobody got the joke. The Youtube community was 99.9% outraged. They started screaming "HATE CRIME", and Youtube pulled the video yesterday, which is why I embedded it from Google Video instead. Good call, Google. You guys get jokes.

The video directs the viewer to lovegodsway.org, which naturally directs the viewer to a bunch of additionalsites for you to visit; Myspacepages and everything. All the elements of, I dunno, some kind of viral marketing campaign! The harder you look at this stuff, the
more obvious the joke becomes. Donnie's even got a user-submitted list
of dangerously gay bands on his page; classic trollbait and a pretty clever play on people's hypocrisy (YOU ASSHOLE HOW DARE YOU HATE GAYS; OH MY GOD YOU DID NOT JUST CALL MY FAVORITE BAND GAY).

January 23, 2007

But I can't for the life of me figure out which. One of these is an iPod-white Optimus Prime figure whose trailer turns into a set of speakers and an iPod docking bay; the other is a Soundwave figure (the robot who turns into a tape deck, you'll recall) that plays MP3s off an SD card. I think I have to give the edge to the already-sold-out Soundwave: not only is it more clever, Optimus just looks really bad in white. I will probably skip on the both of them; my novelty musical robot is a Gundam head with speakers in it, and the sound quality is about on par with a tin can telephone. Now these guys are a lot more expensive, but so is a decent pair of speakers. I guess we'll have to take somebody else's word on it when they come out!

January 20, 2007

This really makes me smile like a jackass. Long story short: the Maru family wins the Robo-One fightin'-robot competition, and among their prizes is the 1/12 HY2M RX-78 Gundam model. All those letters and numbers and whatnot mean that it's a frickin' five-footGundam. Make sure to follow the link to the Maru family's photoset, in which they actually build the monster step-by-step. It's like watching all the Christmas mornings of your youth put together. I imagine the only person happier than the kids is Dad behind the camera. Anyway, to fill this post out, here's the match (also from Robots-Dreams) in which the Marus' King-Kizer (the red one) won the Robo-One 10 championship, and, indirectly, a Gundam:

First things first, a bit of buyer beware: ADV gave this book a shamelessly misleading cover. The Gainax/Eva connection is milked for all it's worth, and the result is that the casual bookstore buyer is probably going to pick up this book thinking it is the story of the production of Evangelion. It is most definitely not; Eva is only given a glance at best.

Now, personally, I'm fine with this. I knew it coming in. I wanted to know about Gainax, and on that front the book delivers. The Notenki Memoirs are something of an autobiography in fandom and fanboy business by Yasuhiro Takeda, Gainax's "general manager". That's as good an explanation as I can give you of what the dude actually did at Gainax; Takeda paints a picture of a fast-and-loose operation where people didn't have job titles and specific tasks to accomplish so much as they worked. People at Gainax worked their asses off; more than anything I was impressed by the sheer youthful energy of these people (the author reminds us, over and over again, every time he fails sophomore year in college) and the single-minded intensity with which they pursued whatever the hell it was they were pursuing. It really speaks to my quarter-life crisis, you know?

This story is much more about the people involved in Gainax than the products they turned out, but there are some interesting tidbits, and some really obscure trivia. Obscurity is the order of the day here. Did you know that the the last episode of Gunbuster wasn't in black and white because the studio ran out of money, but because Anno insisted on doing a a black-and-white episode on color film? It was the opposite of the oft-repeated fan urban legend; the episode was in fact a tremendous waste of money. It is comments like this, made in passing, that are the juiciest bits for the Gainax fan. When Takeda does talk about Gainax's projects, he makes sure to give the most coverage to the most obscure. There's quite a bit in here that never made past planning stages, and quite a bit I'd never even heard of, including Komatsu Sakyo Anime Gekijou, which was completely news to me, and which I'd very much like to see.

Another thing that occurred to me while I was reading was Takeda's account of the departure of Toshio Okada, a founding Gainax member and writer of the fan-favorite Otaku no Video. There's clearly some bad blood between these two. Takeda portrays Okada as having been, in later years, a layabout. Apparently, the guy never did any work aside from shooting off fanciful and infeasible ideas that didn't go anywhere, expecting everybody else to drop everything and get to work on them while he continued to chill. That's so otaku! This bit pops out at me particularly because Otaku no Video makes so much sense with it in mind. Talk about fanciful and infeasible; the end goal of the OVA's fictional Gainax-stand-in is to build a giant underground mechanical fortress from which to rule the world in some kind of Char-helmeted otaku dictatorship.

I don't know who to side with here; Takeda the manager or Okada the dreamer. On the one hand, the dreamer Gainax would have lived hand-to-mouth, sleeping in animators' sweatshops, putting every ounce of themselves into some quirky masterpiece that won't really make any money. On the other hand, Gainax mostly makes safe and easy cash-grab projects nowadays. Not that I can blame them; they've been the dreamers, and it's moved them into jaded professionalism, and that's moved them to He Is My Master. I guess I'd do the same thing.

January 17, 2007

I come bearing news for which you may not be prepared. Sit down and take some deep breaths before continuing to read this post. It's dangerous to go this alone, but it's alright. I'll be here. You'll be fine.

The small Japanese publisher Hamster has been releasing a number of various other companies' arcade obscurities on the PS2 under the Oretachi Geesen (Geasen? Game Center? Nobody agrees) name for the past few years. Hamster just did a vote to see which of the games they had the rights to their audience would most like to see ported to the PS2. When the votes were in, Japan made the right choice.

Trio The Punch: Never Forget Me... is easily the strangest videogame Data East ever expected anybody to pay for. I would argue that it's more parody than Parodius; where Parodius is a solid, coherent, and well-designed videogame, a game with some semblance of organization (even if the themes of the levels are bizarre they are, after all, consistent), Trio the Punch is made up entirely of random nonsense. The gameplay is so poor that when I first played it, I assumed the game to be a bootleg with Data East's name slapped on it. Not so, not so: This was a real videogame, really released to real arcades. In Japan, of course. The rest of us were spared.

The characters are three genre archetypes: the ninja, the barbarian, and the backwards baseball cap. They're not strange on their own, but taken together, they are... unsettling. Barbarian and Baseball Cap play more or less the same, but the ninja actually plays like whatever Shinobi knockoff he was torn out of. The design mentality of this game comes from a gleeful disregard for order and coherence: never mind how that shit's gonna work out, just toss it in there.

Here I'm being assaulted by multiple Karnovs. They come from land, from air and from water. Karnovs everywhere. You will become acquainted. You know that ninja thing where you swing your sword at the guy but he disappears, there's a log in his place, and he's behind you and he slits your throat? When the ninja gets hit in this game, he just turns into a log and sits there for a second. He doesn't go anywhere. He just turns right back into a ninja and lets the guy keep on hitting him. That's just the kind of game this is.

In between levels there's a lottery; you can power up, power down, or change your characters. This old fellow in the corner will comment on your actions. Even the weapons are completely out of nowhere: Baseball Cap upgrades from his bare fists to a punching bag (note that in this screenshot both Baseball Cap and the hand boss are inside the ground), and the claw in the picture never even appears in the game, as far as I know. It's just that kind of game and you're going to have to learn to run with it. Later escapades include being cursed by a giant pink sheep (who you must then become), and other hilarious wackamajinx that are way too good to spoil.

What I'm giving you here is merely scratching the surface of exactly how not right Trio the Punch is. To really understand you're going to have to actually play it. As weird as what you see onscreen is, the game feels weirder. It's floaty, almost weightless, and completely inconsistent. Things just go right on through each other. You won't know why and it won't matter; this game plays like it was built from cardboard and duct tape. For now, MAME emulates it, but I expect you to be in line with me to preorder the PS2 version, you hear? It's important to give back to whatever fucking sick monsters created this awful, awful videogame. Ten out of ten. A-plus, man.